At breakfast the next morning I was waited on by Atupu, the beauty.  Her face was tear-stained, and a deep weariness was upon her.  She regarded me with a glance of mixed anger and hurt.

“Vous etes fache avec moi?” she inquired accusingly.

“I angry with you?” I repeated.  “Why what have I done to show it?”

And then she told me of her visit and vigil.  Seeing me alone in Tahiti, and kind-hearted, she said, she had thought to tell me of the Tahitian heart and the old ways of the land.  She had robed, perfumed, and adorned herself, and entered my sleeping-place, as she said was the wont of Tahitian girls.  I had certainly heard her enter, and seen her kneel to await my greeting, and if not then, I had seen her plainly when I lifted the lamp, for the light had streamed full upon her.  She had remained there upon the floor half an hour until my audible breathing had compelled her to believe against her will that I was asleep.  Then she had fled and wept the night in humiliation.  Never in her young life had such a horror afflicted her.

I was stunned, and could only reiterate that I had not known of her presence, and with a trinket from my pocket I dried her tears.

Rupert Brooke in a letter to a friend in England drew a little etching of our lodging: 

I am in a hovel at the back of my hotel, and contemplate the yard.  The extraordinary life of the place flows round and near my room—­for here no one, man or woman, scruples to come through one’s room at any moment, if it happens to be a shortcut.  By day nothing much happens in the yard—­except when a horse tried to eat a hen, the other afternoon.  But by night, after ten, it is filled with flitting figures of girls, with wreaths of white flowers, keeping assignations....  It is all—­all Papeete—­like a Renaissance Italy with the venom taken out, No, simpler, light-come and light-go, passionate and forgetful, like children, and all the time South Pacific, that is to say unmalicious and good-tempered.

When a steamship was in port the Tiare was a hurly-burly.  Perhaps forty or even a hundred extra patrons came for meals or drinks.  It was amusing to hear their uncomprehending anger at their failure to obtain quick service or even a smile by their accustomed manner toward dark peoples.  The British, who were the majority of the travelers, have a cold, autocratic attitude toward all who wait upon them, but especially toward those of the colored races.  In Tahiti they suffered utter dismay, because Tahitians know no servitude and pay no attention to sharp words.

I saw a red-faced woman giving an order for aperitifs to To Sen, the Chinese waiter.

“Two old-fashioned gin cocktails,” she iterated.  “You savee, gin and bitters?  Be sure it’s Angostura, and lemon and soda, and two Manhattans with rye whisky.  Hurry along now!  Old-fashioned, remember!”

In ten minutes Temanu came for the order.  To Sen knew no English, and Temanu only, “Yais, ma darleeng,” and “Whatnahell?”